John D. Lee is most often remembered as the only man executed for his role in the infamous 1857 massacre by Mormons of a California-bound emigrant train at Mountain Meadows in southern Utah. This classic biography examines the circumstances and events which brought Lee to that end. It also, however, looks at the other dimensions of his active life, showing that he was a far more important and complex man than subsequent generations, eager for a dark symbol, have acknowledged. He was a leader in the Mormon colonization of southern Utah and northern Arizona. With the title Indian Farmer, he became his church's emissary to Indians in the area. During and prior to the Mormon migration west, he participated in and kept detailed accounts of the conflicts and other events in Missouri, Illinois, and along the trail. An early practitioner, and recorder, of the custom of plural marriage, he was the adopted son of Brigham Young and a close associate of other Mormon leaders. His occupations included builder, farmer, missionary, ferry operator, town founder, and faith leader.

Using Lee's extensive diaries, bolstered by numerous supporting accounts, Juanita Brooks has not only written a thorough and objective portrait of one man's life, a life which would be worthy of study even if it were not controversial, she also has provided numerous insights into early Mormon society and culture. Anyone interested in Mormon polygamy, family life, leadership, relations with Indians, or other aspects of their frontier existence will find this a storehouse of information.

This classic biography is now in its fourth Utah State University Press printing. It is unparalleled in providing a thorough and accurate account of John D. Lee's involvement in the tragic 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre. 

A quintessentially American saga, the life of Joseph Smith offers believers and non-believers alike an epic narrative that inhabits both grounded history and a heavenly sphere of action. Zachary McLeod Hutchins renders Smith’s early life as a poetic narrative in two parts. The first introduces a very human Joseph and his youthful encounter with demonic powers seeking to prevent any communication with heaven. Following his First Vision, the teenaged prophet is charged by the angel Moroni to retrieve and translate a sacred record inscribed on gold plates. The second part picks up the story four years later, as Joseph marries Emma Hale and undertakes the plates’ translation. Hutchins supplies a fictionalized excerpt from that translation, The Book of Lehi, and details Joseph’s efforts to organize his growing band of followers, concluding on a note of contentment at odds with the tumultuous times to come in Smith’s final years. An innovative perspective on Smith’s early exploits, Joseph: An Epic reinterprets the origin story of a religious seeker and the faith he created.

LeRoy Anderson in 1981 first published, under the title For Christ Will Come Tomorrow, his definitive study of a charismatic, millenarian prophet and the Church of Jesus Christ of the Most High. He told there of a Mormon posse’s 1862 attack on the Morrisite compound, killing Joseph Morris, and of the continuing Morrisite movement, which survived into the mid-twentieth century. In this newly revised edition, Anderson revisits his subject by referring to more recently discovered documents, considering other scholars’ continuing work on Morris’s sect and related subjects, and examining a 1980s messianic sect that claimed a direct connection to the Morrisites.

New documentary sources include a holograph “History of George Morris,” written by Joseph Morris’s brother, which Anderson quotes at length. What was once a little-studied subject has since received attention from a number of scholars. Anderson references such current work on Mormon schismatic movements and broader subjects, much of which drew on his work. Perhaps the book’s most interesting and unintended influence was on that obscure 1980s messianic sect, in Montana, which learned of Morris through Joseph Morris and the Saga of the Morrisites.

"Junius and Joseph examines Joseph Smith's nearly forgotten [1844] presidential bid, the events leading up to his assassination on June 27, 1844, and the tangled aftermath of the tragic incident. It... establishes that Joseph Smith's murder, rather than being the deadly outcome of a spontaneous mob uprising, was in fact a carefully planned military-style execution. It is now possible to identify many of the key individuals engaged in planning his assassination as well as those who took part in the assault on Carthage jail. And furthermore, this study presents incontrovertible evidence that the effort to remove the Mormon leader from power and influence extended well beyond Hancock County [Illinois] (and included prominent Whig politicians as well as the Democratic governor of the state), thereby transforming his death from an impulsive act by local vigilantes into a political assassination sanctioned by some of the most powerful men in Illinois. The circumstances surrounding Joseph Smith's death also serve to highlight the often unrecognized truth that a full understanding of early Mormon history can be gained only when considered in the context of events taking place in American society as a whole."